As I mentioned in yesterday's 9/11 column (sharply titled by my excellent syndicate editor "A Day That Will Live in ... Islamic Accomodation"), the demonstration in downtown Brussels held by the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang both to mark 9/11/08 and to protest the Islamization of Europe was broken up by Belgian police--and, according to one participant who emailed me yesterday, it was broken up before the group could finish laying flowers at the base of the World Trade Center there.

How's that for efficient police work?

The mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, had denied Vlaams Belang a permit for the demonstration for several reasons as reported in the Belgian press: the event would be too "sensitive"; the event would be taking place too close to "sensitive" neighborhoods; and it would be taking place during the presumably sensitive span of Ramadan.

"Sensitive"? Let's snip away the euphemistic grape leaf. The mayor was referring to a potential Muslim reaction in Brussels,...

I haven't been posting over the last several days as I await the transfer of this blogsite to a new and improved server. Should happen any day now.
Meanwhile, I just wanted to alert readers to my upcoming appearance as guest-host of "Book Notes" on C-SPAN this weekend. I will be interviewing Pat Buchanan about his newbook "Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed Are Tearing America Apart."
The book is a Buchanan-esque (un-sugarcoated) overview of the weaknesses PB sees afflicting the Union, both domestically, and in regard to a foreign policy I would agree is over-reaching in its stated goal, as President Bush put it in his Second Inaugural Address, of "ending tyranny in our world." The book is, of course, bracing in its assessments. It also taught me a few things. For example, PB reviews a symposium he participated in back in 1989 sponsored by The National Interest in which a selection of writers (including Chas. Krauthammer, Ben Wattenberg, Jeane Kirkpatrick) were asked to discuss what US foreign policy should look like after the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. This was before the Berlin Wall actually came down....

The Jerusalem Post's Carolyn Glick sums up the fallout from the NIE, which this week, of course, declared that Iran had decided eschew nuclear weapons-making for underwater basket-weaving. This pronouncement--which is not even supported by the body of the report--has set off a clamor for engagement with the Iranian mullah-ocracy, and against any policies that might be construed as strong or effective, from military strikes (natch) to even sanctions. Glick's analysis is especially trenchant, and bitterly so, when she speculates about the tie-in to last week's Annapolis Conference:
Many commentators applauded the Annapolis conference, claiming that its real aim was to cement a US-led coalition including Israel and the Arabs against Iran. These voices argued that it made sense for Israel to agree to negotiate on bad terms in exchange for such a coalition. But the NIE shows that the US double-crossed Israel. By placing the bait of a hypothetical coalition against Iran, the US extracted massive Israeli concessions...

Dr. Al-Zhivago, call your office:
Moscow (AsiaNews) -- Moscow’s first private clinic based on Sharia law opened its doors yesterday. “The policlinic will strictly abide by Sharia law by observing, above all, gender differences in its services,” said Anna Kisko, a spokesperson for the health network responsible for the facility.
In the new centre women will be served by female specialists; men by male specialists, she told the Interfax Religion agency.
The administrative personnel will also be dressed accordingly to Sharia law, i.e. the doctors will only have their hands open and female doctors will have to wear headscarves or possibly hijabs.
The opening of a Halal cafeteria and a prayer room with a screen separating men from women should also be available at the policlinic. In addition, all medicines used at the policlinic will have to conform to Halal principles and not contain any alcohol.
(Via Brussels Journal.)

As I wend my way through my veritable library of Clinton Scandals Past (column to follow), I have happened across two good reasons to say Good Riddance to longtime Republican Senator from Mississippi Trent Lott, who announced his retirement from the Senate at the end of November.
Good Riddance #1 comes from Sell-Out: The Inside Story of President Clinton's Impeachment by David Schippers, the chief cousel to the 13 House Managers, led by the late Henry Hyde. After the historic vote in the House of Representatives to impeach President Clinton in December of 1998, Mr. Schippers writes of a meeting he attended with the House Managers, a few others, and then-Senate Majority Leader Lott and then-Senator Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania Republican) to discuss the Senate trial to come.

Having submitted to Saudi dictates against their shaking hands with, or any Muslims using the same doorways as Israelis at last week's Munich Conference--I mean--the Annapolis Conference, the United States of America now limps a little as Leader of the Free World. There is no "peace" to "conference" when one side, the Muslim side, fails to acknowledge the equality--the humanity--of the other side, the Jews. Acquiescing to these dhimmi rules of Islam, which are kin to such twisted Western phenomena as Jim Crow, apartheid, and Nazism, goes against everything the US stands for, and that is a great and terrible shame.

....I will be appearing tonight and tommorrow night on the political roundtable on "Lou Dobbs This Week," both evenings at 6pm on CNN.
And later this evening, at 10 pm, C-SPAN BookTV will be carrying the talk I gave earlier this week on my book The Death of the Grown-Up at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. C-SPAN BookTV will repeat the talk on Sunday at 7am.

The always strategically illuminating Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post reveals the extent to which our President acquiesced to and sanctioned brutish Islamic supremacism at the Annapolis Conference.
She writes:

I am sorry to say that Henry Hyde, the former US representative from Illinois, has died at age 83. As a cub reporter, I was given the opportunity to spend some time with this kind, stately and honorable congressman working on a profile. And what a profile--his, I mean: memorably sharp and chiseled.

At a closed-door session during the Munich Conference--I mean, the Annapolis Conference--Condoleezza Rice spoke of the empathy she feels for both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis due to her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama "at a time of separation and tension" in the segregated South.
According to the Washington Post, Rice's remarks went like this:

Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to give a talk at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, about my book, The Death of the Grown-Up. It was particularly nice event given that it was moderated by Heritage's Helle Dale who, back in the days when she, as they say, "helmed" the editorial page of the Washington Times, invited me to contribute a column to the op-ed page, thus beginning my incarnation as a weekly columnist. That was in 1999. She later hired me as an editorial writer as well, a job I much enjoyed before leaving it in 2002, basically, to settle down a little to try to write The Death of the Grown-Up...

Every story about Saudi Arabia's participation in the Munich Conference--I mean, Annapolis Conference--reports the fact that the Saudis have pre-emptively trumpeted their refusal to shake hands with the Israelis.
Well, who wants to shake hands with the Saudis?
It's not only that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, that most of the foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudi, that its state-run mosques regularly demonize Jews, Americans and other infidels. It is a barbaric country, where freedom of conscience and equality before the law are denied, and where mercy and compassion have no place.

Quote of the day from GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee:
"Every time we put our credit card in the gas pump, we're paying so that the Saudis get rich - filthy, obscenely rich, and that money then ends up going to funding madrassas," schools "that train the terrorists," said Huckabee. "America has allowed itself to become enslaved to Saudi oil. It's absurd. It's embarrassing."

Had a chance to catch "The Awful Truth" the other night for maybe the third time over the years. The 1937 screwball comedy with Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy (aces-high-larious as the Oklahoma oil man) still delights and would make a fine Thanksgiving weekend entertainment, although it's definitely not children's fare. We often assume that all "old movies" should be rated G for their lack of nudity, bad language, etc., etc., but the subject matter--in this case, infidelity/divorce among the black-tie-and-cocktails set--isn't for kids, even when leavened with witty dialogue (which also isn't really for most kids). Have some fun and watch a bona fide "adult" comedy.

Read this if you want to find out how truly fortunate we all are that manners have been junked; "ladylike" eradicated; manliness smashed; and humanity makes a pen of pirahnas look like the lads of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

As it plans to insert Israel into the meat-grinder at Annapolis next week and pull out a "legacy" on the other side, the Bush administration is sounding increasingly desparate in its rhetoric of justification for this perversely villlainous political act.
The New York Times explains the Annapolis conference rationale:
"The all-out push essentially speeds to the end of the now dormant 2003 `road map' for peace by insisting that the big issues once relegated to later discussion, like the status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees, be addressed immediately, even before the Palestinians begin to dismantle terrorist groups and networks."

Granted, "Dhimm-information" is a bit of stretch when it comes to neologisms. But we need a new term for melding the concept of disinformation with the promotion of dhimmitude. Here is an example of how it works--or, rather, how it is working.
First, here are the facts.
Writing at the Counterterrorism Blog, Jeffrey Imm ruined my breakfast--I mean, reported on an upcoming Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal conference to be held in the United Arab Emirates (site of the new Ethipia-shaped home of Brangelina.

Benazir Bhutto's niece, whose parliamentarian father was mysteriously assassinated while sister Benazir was prime minister, gives us a something to think about before awarding Benazir the democracy halo.

Flash!
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have just bought a manmade island of the coast of Dubai in the shape of Ethiopia. News accounts tell us they plan to use the reclaimed piece of land to showcase....Guess what?
The Dubai boycott of all things Israeli?
The quaint effects of sharia law?
The homey haunts of what Rep. Pete King once memorably called "Al Qaeda heartland"?

While we wrangle over supporting Musharraf or supporting democracy in our dealings with Pakistan, there's another question to consider: Are we, the US, in a war, or aren't we?
There is an air of unserious surrealism to our struggle to neutralize the blackmailing threat of terrorism emanating from the Islamic world--something the crisis in Pakistan exposes all too clearly. In my column this week, I noted the deeply pro-sharia sentiments of Pakistanis, as consistently revealed by periodic polling and news analysis.

All too many of the trials our courageous forbears underwent in facing down the tyrants of the past are lost to us--comfortable, forgetful, irresponsible heirs that we are. But failing to appreciate and understand their sacrifice puts our own liberty at risk.

Tomorrow's column takes a look at the conservative split on Pakistan: the Support the Lesser Evil (Musharraf) crowd vs: Democracy Is the Answer crowd. With every day a reminder of Jimmy Carter's catastrophic abandonment of the Shah of Iran in 1978--thus unleashing jihadism in the region (and, not incidentally, empowering Ayatollah Khomeini, a far more repressive leader than the Shah ever was), I go with the Lesser Evil crowd--particularly after watching ballot-box diplomacy yield nothing but gains for radicalism across the Muslim Middle East.

One phrase that always sticks in my craw is "the Saudi monarch." What monarchy is that--the House of Crude? The Kingdom of Jihad? If we called "King" Abdullah "the Saudi oil-igarch" instead of "the Saudi monarch" would we continue to bow and scrape and generally prostrate our nations before this barbarian?

Because Israel has spent its entire modern history in a state of siege, surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction, what we tend to think of as "culture wars" over identity and point of view have a dire connection to reality in Israel that our own culture wars have traditionally not had. (For an explanation of how the so-called culture wars in this country became "The Real Culture War" after 9/11, see Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up.)

WorldNetDaily,com reports:
"Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has taken thousands of dollars in cash donations from Islamists under federal investigation for terror-financing, money laundering and tax fraud."
If this is the Clinton campaign's idea of how to make us forget about all the Other Crooked Donors So Far--Abdul Rehman Jinnah ($30K, Norman Hsu ($850K Chinatown ($380K, etc., I think they think we're pretty stupid.
Are we?

Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets passed away yesterday. He was 92. Having served his country in the military for three decades, he is famous for one day in particular: August 6, 1945, when, piloting the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, he dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The single blast killed tens of thousands of people.
Japan refused to surrender. On August 9, President Truman order a second nuclear strike on Nagasaki, a mission piloted by Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, who passed away in 2004. That explosion killed tens of thousands more.

In a way, "Oklahoma!" exemplifies the perfect melding of different aspects of America. With music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the show transforms the idiom of the Great Plains into a soaring, folkloric Broadway musical. It is a testament not only to that rich idiom, but also to the genius of the show's creators. They, of course, did not belong to land that was grand, but rather were extremely urbane New Yorkers--Rodgers coming from a prosperous Jewish family, and Hammerstein, of Jewish and Scottish descent, from a prominent theatrical family.

More Halloween fun. The Sun (UK) reports:
"A school was yesterday accused of making teachers dress up as Asians for a day – to celebrate a Muslim festival.
"Kids at the 257-pupil primary have also been told to don ethnic garb even though most are Christians.

Halloween seems like the appropriate day to bring up the eternal masquerade of Hollywood's communists and fellow-travellers as freedom-loving small-"d" democrats. And this Halloween is particularly timely given we are at the 60th anniversary of the House Committee of Un-American Activities hearings (HCUA, by the way, not HUAC, as it is commonly called, I really do think, because HUAC carries a more sinister sound than HCUA). Turner Classic Movies marked the occasion last night with an all-night festival of movies by the Hollywood Ten, who, of course, remain eternal icons of the Left for "refusing to name names" of members of a world communist movement--a movement which the same Left adamantly refuses to admit the existence of. Oh well. That's history, Hollywood-style, for you.

Lady Justice herself wears a blindfold to ensure impartiality, but today her newest acolytes today are scrutinizing race, gender and sexual orientation before they'll even write a brief. Of course, these new lawyers coming out of Stanford Law School aren't scrutinizing their prospective clients--at least, not that we know of. They're looking hard at their prospective employers. According to an Orwell-transcendent story in the New York Times, these students are ranking the nations top law firms according to "how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, is still running for president, but he's announced he won't be seeking re-election to his congressional seat. Too bad for the country, although I'm sure he'll find far pleasanter things to do--unless, that is, he makes it to the Oval Office.
But what a congressional legacy he leaves. Having entered Congress in 1999 to bring America back to its immigration senses, Tancredo had given himself a seemingly impossible task: persuading the nation that there was an illegal ...

A few choice Oklahoma blogs are buzzing over the way in which the No-Koran 24--the two dozen Oklahoma legislators who have declined gifts of personalized, state-seal-embossed Korans from a government Muslim group--appear to have been set up for their media fall into a vat of PC hogwash. For turning down the gift of a Koran (the book at the basis of Islamic law, which denies all Western notions of human rights), the Oklahoma 24 are being subjected to charges of bigotry and mean-spiritedness. Such charges are as absurd as witchcraft accusations in 17th-century-Salem, but that, of course, doesn't stop our high priests of PC.

One of the epic successes of the Communist and fellow-travelling Left in this country was its suppression of the Cold War in the popular culture. I refer to to near-total blackout on movies and TV that chronicle the primary struggle of the last century between Freedom and totalitarian Communism.

Today's column looks at 24 Oklahoma lawmakers who declined to receive a gift of a personalized, state-seal-stamped Koran from an all-Muslim state advisory body. This is surely a surreal confluence of not church and state, but mosque and state, which, under Islam, are always fused in the system of sharia law--a system that denies all Western-style human rights.

The Washington Post's Terri Sapienza identifies a new culprit in the ongoing investigation into the death of the grown-up: Halloween.
In an article called, "From Boo to Eeeww: When did Halloween get so ghastly gruesome," she reveals that adult involvement helps explain the intense gore-ification and even the pornification of the of the holiday.
Once upon a time, jack 'o' lanterns and Casper the Friendly Ghost made Halloween about as sweet as candycorns. Now, with bloody and severed limb props and maggots, it's got another vibe going. Apparently, things changed around 1978, the year "Halloween" came out.

Naivete on a college campus may be indulged or rationalized as "idealism"--behavior or thought based on a conception of how things ought to be, and even seem to be while dreaming beside a well-manicured quadrangle.
Naivete on a battlefield, however, is something else again--irresponsible. wasteful and dangerous monkeying around with people's lives and nation's fortunes.
I was struck by this on reading a recent New York Times report about a new American effort to "break corruption," as a military commander put it, in Afghanistan.

About those Hannah Montana tickets for 'tweens averaging $250 a pop (as much as a month's worth of one-hour private music lessons):
What has gone haywire is the parental conception of proportion. Between the repressed "Children should be seen and not heard," and the indulged "Children should be showered with fabulously expensive pop concert tickets," there is another way. But it is another way that has become lost to all too many adults of America's vast middle class today.

When we think of decadence ripe for the overthrow, we usually think of the twisted excess of Ancient Rome, the self-indulgence of the Ancien Regime, the louche years of Weimar. We don't usually think of death by treacle. But that--if this article about the frantic parental bloodletting of cash and emotion into "Hannah Montana," the latest "tween" craze, is to be believed (and, alas, there is no reason not to believe it)--looks to be our sugary downfall.

One April day this year, the Los Angeles Times reports, Hillary Clinton collected $380,000 from a fund-raiser in just about the poorest section of New York City. That section is Chinatown, where dishwashers and busboys who, in the main, don't speak much English and often work for sub-minimum wages, were somehow able to find, say, $1,000 in their pockets--tips?--for Mrs. Clinton. (By contrast, John Kerry netted $24,000 in 2004. )

"Counterculture McGoverniks" was what Newt Gingrich aptly called Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton on his becoming Speaker of the House in 1994, as Harvard's Harvey Mansfield reminded us in one of the most lucid essays ever written on the1960s. His essay is called "The Legacy of the Late Sixties," and it appears in a 1997 collection edited by Stephen Macedo called Reassessing the Sixties. (Professor Mansfield warns his readers "not to expect a nonjudgmental treatment framed in the weasel words of social science," so you know it's going to be good.)
The New York Times sprang to the Clintons' defense, Mansfield noted, with a flowery editorial "in praise of the counterculture." This editorial, he explained, revealed "by its very appearance in the nation's most prestigious newspaper how far the counterculture had become regnant."

Back from New Haven where I spoke at a Master's tea to a pleasantly attentive group which--following my D of the G presentation about what happens when an infantilized society that PC-censors itself meets an expansionist Islam that demands such censorship as a point of law--surprised me. Where I expected to hear the undergraduates tell me that, say, Islam wasn't all bad, that I had oversimplified, what emerged instead was a consensus that the West wasn't all good, that I had oversimplified.
As the Yale Daily News later put it, "Some students said West blamed Americans for censoring themselves in thought but ignored the censorship she exploys in her own speech by concentrating only on the positive aspects of Western civilization."

What is new under the sun? Supposedly, the "odyssey years." This is the stretch of time, according to social scientists cited in a column by the New York Times' David Brooks, between adolescence and adulthood--say, between age 20 and age 35--during which careers are tried, commitments are deferred, and no one wants to be called "Mister."
If that sounds a little bit like the phenomenon analyzed in my book, The Death of the Grown-Up, it is--but only a little bit. I finally crystallized the difference for myself, but after being interviewed for a Times of London article on the subject, so here it is:

The Nobel Prize for Peace should be renamed the Nobel Prize for Virtue--with virtue being defined as a set of left-wing attitudes and opinions.
Consolation prize for the Gore-itated: A British High Court ruled this week that his magnus opus, "An Inconvenient Truth," contained to many errors to be used as a teaching aid in the British schools without also teaching about the errors. (This judge counted nine.)

On October 11, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the following:
“I believe that there could be no greater legacy for America than to help to bring into being a Palestinian state for a people who have suffered too long, who have been humiliated too long, who have not reached their potential for too long, and who have so much to give to the international community and to all of us."